Lance Armstrong, match-fixing and Operation Puerto are turning the courtroom into a sporting arena

With this sporting life has come the death of innocence. For many years now
professional sport has laid claim to a place on the crime pages. But never
has it seemed to fit so well with the work of police, lawyers and judges
than in this benighted era of doping, match-fixing and corruption.

The death of innocence: Lance Armstrong has been a central figure in sport's murky recent historyPhoto: AP

With Dick Pound, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, saying he is “sure” tennis has a doping problem, and even golf being dragged in through Vijay Singh’s admission that he has used deer antler spray (which contains a banned substance), the entire sporting universe appears intent on telling us that what we pay to watch cannot be trusted.

The industrialisation of sport is the obvious culprit, followed by the mega-expansion of sports betting together with corrupt pharmacology.

The whistle-blowers are mostly enforcement bodies: the US Anti-Doping Agency in America, Europol in match-fixing and the Australian Crime Commission. The impetus is not coming from governing bodies such as Fifa or cycling’s UCI.

Though we can be grateful that higher powers are doing the work of those who are meant to be running sport, we should be alarmed that so many governing bodies are supine, or in some cases complicit. There is only one saving force: the rule of law, and criminal prosecutions instead of fines and bans, which are being treated as occupational hazards.